It is my favorite annual event and attracts hundreds of the best authors worldwide. Many consider it to be the best book festival in the US. So far, I have seen Cornell West, Tavis Smiley, Gore Vidal, and I plan to see Naomi Klein, Scott Mc Clellan, Carl Hiassen, Vernon Jordan, Salmon Rushtie, Dave Barry and many more.
Here is an article published in the Miami Herald:
Miami book fair speaks volumes about local passion for books
BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI
The Miami Book Fair International, widely known as one of the biggest and best in the country if not the biggest and best, started out small. Really small. Or the idea behind it did: to borrow some folding tables and sell used books in Bayfront Park.
Had the beginning actually been that inauspicious, we wouldn't be talking now about the fair's 25th annual edition, which opens Sunday evening with headliners Cornel West and Tavis Smiley -- what timing! -- discussing race and America at Miami Dade College's downtown campus.
Nor would there be reason to ponder once again -- as fairgoers mob several blocks of downtown Miami, filling readings by authors celebrated and obscure, lining up for signings, snapping up books by the tens of thousands -- this annual riddle: How does a bookish event attain such success and longevity in a town better known, fairly or not, for sunburns and hangovers?
Go back to 1984.
As luck would have it, Eduardo Padrón, head of the downtown campus of what was then Miami-Dade Community College, which owned the tables, rejected the used-book sale.
Padrón invited the organizers, including a young bookseller named Mitchell Kaplan, to breakfast and nudged them to think big: How about a street fair like Barcelona's famed book festival, which he had just visited? Why not have it at the college? And why not invite authors to read, speak and sign and sell books? And why not make it fun for people not that into books?
`LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE'
Kaplan and his coterie needed no arm-twisting. Kaplan had been hosting authors at his tiny, literature-focused Books & Books in Coral Gables since its opening two years before. He was selling some serious books; he knew there were hungry readers in Miami.
''As in any car-culture city, people didn't know there were other like-minded people here,'' Kaplan, still the book fair's chairman, recalls. ``Eduardo Padrón threw the weight of the college behind this thing, at a time when people thought the only books being read here were nonprescription-drug books. I knew better, but there were few models for what we were doing.''
No one was prepared for what happened at that first fair.
Throngs of greedy book lovers materialized in the forbidding ghost city of downtown, lining up for readings -- sometimes having to shove their way in -- and buying books right and left. Organizers were shocked and giddy. So were the authors and the publishers Padrón and Kaplan had had to beg to come. Thus, the template for every future fair was set.
Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobelists, poets and historians, Kennedys and Watergate burglars, mystery writers and celebrity authors, movie stars and rock stars, satirists, cooks, cranks and critics -- even Barack Obama -- have appeared at the book fair, some of them more than once. Some can't seem to get enough of it. (I saw him in 2006!!)
''Year in and year out, the Miami book festival gets stronger and stronger,'' says journalist David Rieff, author of two books on Miami and a frequent fair guest. ``It now can compete with any literary fair in the world in getting anyone to come.
``This is an important place to go as a writer, to see other writers, to publicize your book, to get noticed. They've made it a place that writers want to be.
``One thing is the broadness of it. It's a very big tent. That's one of its great strengths.''
But something else happened along the way, too.
The discovery of a core of numerous local readers and, along with it, a small group of talented but virtually unknown home-grown writers with original voices and a potent sense of this peculiar place, began to nourish a new idea of South Florida as -- get this -- a literary place. And as the fair has grown in scope and prominence, so has the reputation of South Florida as a locus for literature.
James W. Hall, Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry, among others, got their first broad exposure at the book fair. Since then, prominent poet Campbell McGrath has made South Florida his muse, and Russell Banks is living part time and finding inspiration in Miami. The city has also become home to Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, who this year won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Brother, I'm Dying, a family memoir.
All are fair stalwarts and will appear again this year, although Danticat only as an attendee because she is ``extremely pregnant.''
''If I'm not giving birth, I will be in the audience,'' she says with a laugh.
Miami's American Exotic continues to attract the carpetbaggers as well. Tom Wolfe is now famously at work fictionalizing the place, and Scotsman Irvine Welsh of Trainspotting fame has set his new crime novel in South Beach.
They've all come here for different reasons. But for 24 years, the fair and South Florida's flourishing literary community have nourished each other, and the fair is the annual homecoming dance.
`A LITERARY CENTER'
''The book fair has turned Miami from a town that was not all regarded as a literary center into one that very much is,'' says Les Standiford, one of those then undiscovered writers and now a bestselling fiction and nonfiction author as well as longtime director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University, which produced Dennis Lehane, who wrote Mystic River.
''To me, it's certainly heartening to know that every year there is going to be this tremendous celebration of the act of reading and writing,'' he adds. ``It's a yearly pat on the back.''
And great business, too. It's the publishers, agents and writers who now plead for invitations. Fair administrators guesstimate that $2 million worth of books are sold during the weeklong event every year.
''My publicist is thrilled to death that I'll be at the book fair this year,'' says Standiford, whose new book, The Man Who Invented Christmas, tells how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol.
Rich as it is, the parade of literary stars is hardly the only factor contributing to the book fair's mass appeal.
From the start, organizers say, they followed the democratic mantra of ''something for everyone.'' Thus, next weekend's street fair, the ethnic-food booths, the celebrity authors, the cookbook authors, the musicians and TV actors, the occasional political figure, the popular and ever-expanding Children's Alley, and this year, a new program focusing on graphic novels and comics for children and adults.
And just as significant are programs in Spanish, French and Creole, which draw eminent authors from Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe, broadening the fair's audience and appeal.
''It's this extraordinary feast,'' Danticat says. 'This book fair has grown in terms of the organizers' vision of it. Part of it is the diversity of writers and the diversity of readers. Writers from all over the world come here, which is kind of singular, operating in all these different languages.''
Moreover, several authors attest, the fair is very well run. Crates of books are delivered on time to author appearances.
Squads of volunteers are deployed to pick up authors and ferry the stars around -- sometimes catering to their whims, as with the famed author who, Padrón recalls without naming names, demanded a particular brand of high-end Scotch at the dais.
A fair offshoot, the Florida Center for the Literary Arts, with a tiny staff, has become the umbrella organization managing the $2 million main event as well as a series of year-round programs. The center helps draw grant money to supplement income from food and book sales, admission fees, corporate sponsors, kiosk rents and substantial funding from the college and Miami-Dade County, among other public entities, says Executive Director Alina Interián. Padrón, now overall president of Miami Dade College, retains his office downtown and an active role in supporting the fair.
Not that there haven't been glitches and mishaps. When Leo Buscaglia, an author known as The Love Doctor, drew several times more people than could fit into the auditorium at an early fair, Padrón had to shout at unruly attendees to behave.
Rarely have there been serious disruptions, although the occasional audience member who refuses to surrender the microphone during questions is ejected. One eminent Talmudic scholar was befuddled when heckled from the back of the room by a Jews for Jesus zealot, Kaplan recalls.
Yet, crowd enthusiasm has led to magical, spontaneous moments. At the first of several fair appearances by radio host and author Garrison Keillor, someone asked him to sing something, and he led the packed auditorium in Tell Me Why.
Another time, Kaplan cringed as a young audience member addressed Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz this way: ''Yo, Czeslaw, you married?'' But Milosz responded that his wife had recently died, and he movingly read to the mesmerized crowd a new poem he had written for her.
''A lot of writers like to come here to the book fair because there is such an atmosphere about it,'' Danticat says. ``It's always a good surprise for writers who come here and see so many people interacting with books.''
IMPRESSIVE GUESTS
The experience can be especially gratifying -- and rewarding -- for lesser-known authors, humorist Dave Barry says.
'You can be sitting in the authors' lounge, some first-time writer, and in comes John Updike,'' he says, flipping through a copy of this year's fair guide, which prompts him to add: ``You'd be hard-pressed to find a collection of authors like this anywhere at any time.
``For a lot of first-time authors, it's the best experience they will have on tour.''
He should know. At the first fair, recalls book fair co-founder Raquel Roque, she was astonished to see a frenzied, overflow mob shove its way into a mid-size room when Barry's reading was announced over speakers in the street. He was then but a humor columnist at The Miami Herald with a small-press book to his credit.
''That's when I realized how big he was going to get,'' Roque says.
Barry, who has been to almost every fair, and possibly to every single one -- the record is not conclusive -- says those who claim that people in Miami don't read are proved wrong each November.
''We're not supposed to be that kind of town,'' he says. ``But the fair's not a fluke. People don't just come out for the big names. Even the people you never heard of, the little panels, reliably get people to come. You know the big auditorium, the Chapman room? They fill that thing over and over all day long. It's amazing.''
Oh, and the weather helps, too.
Here is an article published in the Miami Herald:
Miami book fair speaks volumes about local passion for books
BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI
The Miami Book Fair International, widely known as one of the biggest and best in the country if not the biggest and best, started out small. Really small. Or the idea behind it did: to borrow some folding tables and sell used books in Bayfront Park.
Had the beginning actually been that inauspicious, we wouldn't be talking now about the fair's 25th annual edition, which opens Sunday evening with headliners Cornel West and Tavis Smiley -- what timing! -- discussing race and America at Miami Dade College's downtown campus.
Nor would there be reason to ponder once again -- as fairgoers mob several blocks of downtown Miami, filling readings by authors celebrated and obscure, lining up for signings, snapping up books by the tens of thousands -- this annual riddle: How does a bookish event attain such success and longevity in a town better known, fairly or not, for sunburns and hangovers?
Go back to 1984.
As luck would have it, Eduardo Padrón, head of the downtown campus of what was then Miami-Dade Community College, which owned the tables, rejected the used-book sale.
Padrón invited the organizers, including a young bookseller named Mitchell Kaplan, to breakfast and nudged them to think big: How about a street fair like Barcelona's famed book festival, which he had just visited? Why not have it at the college? And why not invite authors to read, speak and sign and sell books? And why not make it fun for people not that into books?
`LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE'
Kaplan and his coterie needed no arm-twisting. Kaplan had been hosting authors at his tiny, literature-focused Books & Books in Coral Gables since its opening two years before. He was selling some serious books; he knew there were hungry readers in Miami.
''As in any car-culture city, people didn't know there were other like-minded people here,'' Kaplan, still the book fair's chairman, recalls. ``Eduardo Padrón threw the weight of the college behind this thing, at a time when people thought the only books being read here were nonprescription-drug books. I knew better, but there were few models for what we were doing.''
No one was prepared for what happened at that first fair.
Throngs of greedy book lovers materialized in the forbidding ghost city of downtown, lining up for readings -- sometimes having to shove their way in -- and buying books right and left. Organizers were shocked and giddy. So were the authors and the publishers Padrón and Kaplan had had to beg to come. Thus, the template for every future fair was set.
Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobelists, poets and historians, Kennedys and Watergate burglars, mystery writers and celebrity authors, movie stars and rock stars, satirists, cooks, cranks and critics -- even Barack Obama -- have appeared at the book fair, some of them more than once. Some can't seem to get enough of it. (I saw him in 2006!!)
''Year in and year out, the Miami book festival gets stronger and stronger,'' says journalist David Rieff, author of two books on Miami and a frequent fair guest. ``It now can compete with any literary fair in the world in getting anyone to come.
``This is an important place to go as a writer, to see other writers, to publicize your book, to get noticed. They've made it a place that writers want to be.
``One thing is the broadness of it. It's a very big tent. That's one of its great strengths.''
But something else happened along the way, too.
The discovery of a core of numerous local readers and, along with it, a small group of talented but virtually unknown home-grown writers with original voices and a potent sense of this peculiar place, began to nourish a new idea of South Florida as -- get this -- a literary place. And as the fair has grown in scope and prominence, so has the reputation of South Florida as a locus for literature.
James W. Hall, Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry, among others, got their first broad exposure at the book fair. Since then, prominent poet Campbell McGrath has made South Florida his muse, and Russell Banks is living part time and finding inspiration in Miami. The city has also become home to Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, who this year won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Brother, I'm Dying, a family memoir.
All are fair stalwarts and will appear again this year, although Danticat only as an attendee because she is ``extremely pregnant.''
''If I'm not giving birth, I will be in the audience,'' she says with a laugh.
Miami's American Exotic continues to attract the carpetbaggers as well. Tom Wolfe is now famously at work fictionalizing the place, and Scotsman Irvine Welsh of Trainspotting fame has set his new crime novel in South Beach.
They've all come here for different reasons. But for 24 years, the fair and South Florida's flourishing literary community have nourished each other, and the fair is the annual homecoming dance.
`A LITERARY CENTER'
''The book fair has turned Miami from a town that was not all regarded as a literary center into one that very much is,'' says Les Standiford, one of those then undiscovered writers and now a bestselling fiction and nonfiction author as well as longtime director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University, which produced Dennis Lehane, who wrote Mystic River.
''To me, it's certainly heartening to know that every year there is going to be this tremendous celebration of the act of reading and writing,'' he adds. ``It's a yearly pat on the back.''
And great business, too. It's the publishers, agents and writers who now plead for invitations. Fair administrators guesstimate that $2 million worth of books are sold during the weeklong event every year.
''My publicist is thrilled to death that I'll be at the book fair this year,'' says Standiford, whose new book, The Man Who Invented Christmas, tells how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol.
Rich as it is, the parade of literary stars is hardly the only factor contributing to the book fair's mass appeal.
From the start, organizers say, they followed the democratic mantra of ''something for everyone.'' Thus, next weekend's street fair, the ethnic-food booths, the celebrity authors, the cookbook authors, the musicians and TV actors, the occasional political figure, the popular and ever-expanding Children's Alley, and this year, a new program focusing on graphic novels and comics for children and adults.
And just as significant are programs in Spanish, French and Creole, which draw eminent authors from Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe, broadening the fair's audience and appeal.
''It's this extraordinary feast,'' Danticat says. 'This book fair has grown in terms of the organizers' vision of it. Part of it is the diversity of writers and the diversity of readers. Writers from all over the world come here, which is kind of singular, operating in all these different languages.''
Moreover, several authors attest, the fair is very well run. Crates of books are delivered on time to author appearances.
Squads of volunteers are deployed to pick up authors and ferry the stars around -- sometimes catering to their whims, as with the famed author who, Padrón recalls without naming names, demanded a particular brand of high-end Scotch at the dais.
A fair offshoot, the Florida Center for the Literary Arts, with a tiny staff, has become the umbrella organization managing the $2 million main event as well as a series of year-round programs. The center helps draw grant money to supplement income from food and book sales, admission fees, corporate sponsors, kiosk rents and substantial funding from the college and Miami-Dade County, among other public entities, says Executive Director Alina Interián. Padrón, now overall president of Miami Dade College, retains his office downtown and an active role in supporting the fair.
Not that there haven't been glitches and mishaps. When Leo Buscaglia, an author known as The Love Doctor, drew several times more people than could fit into the auditorium at an early fair, Padrón had to shout at unruly attendees to behave.
Rarely have there been serious disruptions, although the occasional audience member who refuses to surrender the microphone during questions is ejected. One eminent Talmudic scholar was befuddled when heckled from the back of the room by a Jews for Jesus zealot, Kaplan recalls.
Yet, crowd enthusiasm has led to magical, spontaneous moments. At the first of several fair appearances by radio host and author Garrison Keillor, someone asked him to sing something, and he led the packed auditorium in Tell Me Why.
Another time, Kaplan cringed as a young audience member addressed Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz this way: ''Yo, Czeslaw, you married?'' But Milosz responded that his wife had recently died, and he movingly read to the mesmerized crowd a new poem he had written for her.
''A lot of writers like to come here to the book fair because there is such an atmosphere about it,'' Danticat says. ``It's always a good surprise for writers who come here and see so many people interacting with books.''
IMPRESSIVE GUESTS
The experience can be especially gratifying -- and rewarding -- for lesser-known authors, humorist Dave Barry says.
'You can be sitting in the authors' lounge, some first-time writer, and in comes John Updike,'' he says, flipping through a copy of this year's fair guide, which prompts him to add: ``You'd be hard-pressed to find a collection of authors like this anywhere at any time.
``For a lot of first-time authors, it's the best experience they will have on tour.''
He should know. At the first fair, recalls book fair co-founder Raquel Roque, she was astonished to see a frenzied, overflow mob shove its way into a mid-size room when Barry's reading was announced over speakers in the street. He was then but a humor columnist at The Miami Herald with a small-press book to his credit.
''That's when I realized how big he was going to get,'' Roque says.
Barry, who has been to almost every fair, and possibly to every single one -- the record is not conclusive -- says those who claim that people in Miami don't read are proved wrong each November.
''We're not supposed to be that kind of town,'' he says. ``But the fair's not a fluke. People don't just come out for the big names. Even the people you never heard of, the little panels, reliably get people to come. You know the big auditorium, the Chapman room? They fill that thing over and over all day long. It's amazing.''
Oh, and the weather helps, too.
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